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“The Truth will set us free”…will it?

I have been following WikiLeaks headlines and stories not because it is telling me something new or something that I have not learnt before: that Information is Power and the more information you have and let others know this, the more powerful it makes you.

But it all depends on who is the one holding the information right? If it’s a religious institution it is called Faith, if it is a Government department it is called Intelligence, if it is a Corporation it is called Privacy, when it is a journalist it is called unnamed sources. Yet when the normal citizen holds the kind of information that gives him power then it is Conspiracy and becomes a dangerous person.

I cannot be sure of Assange’s motifs behind releasing classified information, I hope it is to share the power, to give power to the people, to let us know hidden truths and wake us up from our main stream media half-truths.

Whatever he was set to do when he started WikiLeaks is working. Thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange’s arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization.

But his freedom of information activism has brought him repercussions…They are after him and not through the fact that he has shared very obvious truths about the political system we abide, otherwise it will look bad and create more social turmoil, but through something that we all feel appalled by: Rape.

The thing is that whether we believe he is innocent or not, the system managed to get him, hold him, banned him, and send a message to all of us writing stories (truths or not), searching for information, sharing knowledge behind our computers:

If you find a truth and share it for free, you pay the price.The truth may not free Julian Assange from his current situation but I hope it will at least guide us towards a more truthful and open society.

From Time Magazine…WikiLeaks’ publication starting Nov. 28 of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables was the largest unauthorized release of contemporary classified information in history. It contained 11,000 documents marked secret; the release of any one of them, by the U.S. government’s definition, would cause “serious damage to national security.” In the U.S., the leak forced a clampdown on intelligence sharing between agencies and new measures to control electronically stored secrets. And diplomats from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the lowest political officers worked to diminish the disclosures’ impact on foreign counterparts.

From Avaaz.org: WikiLeaks isn’t acting alone — it’s partnered with the top newspapers in the world(New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, etc) to carefully review 250,000 US diplomatic cables and remove any information that it is irresponsible to publish. Only 800 cables have been published so far. Past WikiLeaks publications have exposed government-backed torture, the murder of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and corporate corruption.